St. Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad,Petersburg

← v15n2, Fall 2016

Oleg had white teeth, but Natalia’s were golden.

He taught “navigation” at the Frunze; she, physics

at Public School 625. He said literature was “a drug,”

and she came shouting, red-faced from the kitchen.

Dima, twenty-two, drank vodka in the metro

on the way to morning class. He mocked the KGB

right there in the living room. I thought he would

cry when I gave him the carton of Marlboros.

Natalia began to look at me all the time, and Oleg

looked at her looking at me. At the celebration

of Women’s Day, their friends, whose daughter was

still too alive to mention, looked away from Natalia

when she looked at me. They insisted I sit in the

cushioned chair. Had they visited the U.S.? The men

looked embarrassed, they looked like boys

when they said they had seen San Diego

through a periscope.

politics history travel place

Ron Smith

Ron Smith, 2014–2016 Poet Laureate of Virginia, is the author of three volumes of poetry from Louisiana State University Press: The Humility of the Brutes (forthcoming), Its Ghostly Workshop (2013), and Moon Road (2007). His collection Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery was published by University of Central Florida Press in 1988. His work has appeared in numerous periodicals, including The Nation , The Kenyon Review , The Southern Review , and The Georgia Review ; and in a number of anthologies published in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Italy. In 2005, Smith was an inaugural winner of the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, and in 2006 he became one of the curators for that prize. Since 2010, he has been the poetry editor for Aethlon : The Journal of Sports Literature . He is the Writer-in-Residence at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, Virginia, where he holds the George Squires Chair of Distinguished Teaching. Photo by Delores Smith